234 An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
GHOSTS AND DEMONS TO HIDE FROM
A living symbol of the genocidal history of the United States, as
well as a kind of general subconscious knowledge of it, is the "Win
chester Mystery House," a tourist site in the Santa Clara (Silicon)
Valley of Northern California. Fifty miles south of San Francisco, it
is billed as a ghost house on billboards that start appearing in Or
egon to the north and San Diego to the south. Sarah L. Winchester,
the wealthy widow of William Wirt Winchester, built the Victorian
mansion to avoid and elude ghosts, although there is no record of
any ghosts ever having found their way into her home. It could be
said, perhaps, that Mrs. Winchester's project from 1884 to her death
in 1922 was a success. She likely was well aware of the widely pub
licized Ghost Dance in 1890, which led to the killing of Sitting Bull
and the Wounded Knee massacre. The dancers believed that the
dance would bring back their dead warriors.
It makes sense that Mrs. Winchester felt the need to guard herself
from the ghosts of those killed by the Winchester repeating rifle,
which her late husband's father had invented and produced in 186 6,
with later models being even more lethal. Mrs. Winchester inherited
the fortune accumulated by her husband's fa mily through sales of
the rifle. There was one major purchaser: the US Department of
War. The chief reason for the War Department's purchases of the
rifle in great quantities: to kill Indians. The rifle was a technological
innovation designed especially for the US Army's campaigns against
the Plail).s Indians following the Civil War.
The Winchester house amazes all who tour it. There are five
floors, more or less, since they are staggered. Each room in itself
appears normal, decorated in the late-nineteenth-century Victorian
mode. But there is more than meets the eye in getting from parlors
to bedrooms to kitchen to closets and from floor to floor. Numerous
stairways dead-end, and secret trapdoors hide the actual stairways.
Closet doors open to walls, and pieces of furniture are really doors
to closets. Huge bookcases serve as entrances to adjoining rooms.
Part of the house was unfinished when the widow died, as she had
construction workers building every day from dawn to dusk, adding
rooms and traps until her death. Visitors trekking through the wid-